Snapshots of Life
by SabaceanBabe
Summary: several ficlets written to request, each ficlet is its own chapter
1. Chapter 1

**Ficlet 1, written to the prompt - John/Cameron; porn (124 words)**

"What is this?"

John looked up from his homework and saw Cameron standing in the doorway. He had asked her to grab his chemistry notebook from his room and rather than that, she held a magazine in her hands, head cocked to one side in curiosity. John felt the blood rush to his face.

"Um, it's nothing." He scrambled up from the kitchen table, glancing at the back door. The last thing he needed was to explain to his mother why Cameron held a skin magazine.

He grabbed it out of Cameron's hand and she frowned. "Your face is red. Do you require medical assistance?"

"No. I, uh…" He fought back a laugh, walked backwards to his room. "I'm just gonna put this back."


	2. Chapter 2

**Written to the prompt - Derek and candy (259 words)**

Derek followed Sarah into the principal's office, alien to him now, but oh, so familiar to him when he'd been John's age. He shook his head at that thought, still sometimes struggling to reconcile John Connor at fifteen with John Connor at thirty-five.

Before he could enter the inner sanctum, Sarah turned to him and said, "Stay out here." It was nothing short of a command and Derek took it in stride. Sarah could handle whatever the principal had to say. It was better that he stay in the outer office, keep watch. He nodded and backed up, turned on one heel and took up a post just inside the outer door.

The woman at the desk watched him, gave him a tentative smile that he didn't return. Her open, friendly expression faltered, but she tried again. "Have a piece of candy?" She gestured toward a dish at the edge of her desk, filled with individually wrapped sweets. A sight he hadn't seen in way too many years. He shook his head no, but his eyes stayed on that dish.

Fifteen minutes later, the inner office door opened and Sarah walked out. The principal called to his assistant and she hurried in, almost knocking over her chair in her haste. Derek grinned after her.

"What was that about?" Sarah asked, staring after the spooked assistant.

"I think I make her nervous."

She gave him a long look, a raised brow, and headed for the door. Derek followed, pausing just long enough to scoop that candy into his jacket pocket.


	3. Chapter 3

**Written for the prompt - Derek's weapon of choice (167 words)**

The grip was cold in his hand, but it soon warmed, taking on the heat of his skin, the blood that flowed underneath. The gun felt like an extension of his own flesh, sleek and deadly, as he sighted in along the short barrel. It wasn't the weapon he'd called his own for so many years – that was lost to him, somewhere in a future he hoped would never come to be. No, what he held in his hand was a product of this time, this world.

He'd traded a diamond for it in an alley the night they'd come through time, and it had served him well in the months since. He relaxed his arm, brought the weapon closer to him, stroked a finger along the black polymer frame, the black steel barrel, over the stylized M&P45 stamped into the metal and the SW molded into the polymer grip.

Sarah had a small arsenal hidden under her bed, but he wouldn't trade this piece for anything.


	4. Chapter 4

**Written for the prompt - Derek rediscovering something about the world pre-Doomsday (345 words)**

He doesn't know what made him come here, of all places and now, of all times. But he _is_ here. The park doesn't look all that different from the last time he saw it, more than fifteen years ago and still four years in the future (_give you one mother of a headache, if you let it_). Maybe a little cleaner, a little newer, the trees not so tall and the Little League diamond not so soft around the edges, but it's still the park he used to bring Kyle to when they were kids. The safe house is only a ten-minute walk from here.

In the distance, a woman pushes a small child in a swing, the kid's legs pumping out of synch with the sway of the swing, threatening to put it into a tailspin. Just beyond that a couple of guys throw a frisbee, playing keep-away with a shaggy black dog – Derek hears the frustrated barking, sometimes louder, sometimes softer, depending on the dog's relative orientation.

Leaning back on the park bench, he smiles, just a little, thinks, _We should get a dog for the safe house._ Added security, if nothing else. But the truth is, he just wants a dog. They don't ask questions and they know who to trust and who to not.

"Hey, Derek! Race you!"

For a moment, his heart stops in his chest, and then it pounds double time. There's a roaring in his ears as he turns toward the childish voice, terrified that he's about to come face to face with… himself.

Not twenty feet away, a pair of boys runs past him toward that crisp, new baseball diamond, the taller of the two just about to overtake the smaller. Kyle. He can't look away; neither can he stay here. Not now. But he feels as though he's paralyzed.

"Hey, Derek," Sayles says as he drops onto the bench, breaking the spell. The other man frowns. "You okay? You look like you've seen a ghost."

Derek stands, feeling a little sick. "See you at the house."


	5. Chapter 5

**Written for the prompt - Sarah and Sarah's mortality go into a bar… (321 words)**

The bar is noisy and crowded. A jukebox in the corner is the only bright spot in the room, with its neon and its backlit song titles, although there is also bright blue neon behind the bottles of alcohol, vying for precedence.

She shouldn't be here. She should be home, with John. She should be doing a lot of things, and none of them involve walking into a crowded bar or ordering straight whiskey, tossing it off like it's water.

She slams the shot glass onto the wood bar, heavily coated with layers upon layers of polyurethane, and watches a couple at the end of the room sway together in time to pounding music. She doesn't really see them, though. All she can see is what was left of Cameron, of a machine that had looked like a girl and that now looks like so much metal and meat. And blood. Lots of blood, albeit synthetic. John had been so intense, nothing of the child left in him. He had begun giving orders and Derek had followed them, if reluctantly.

And Sarah had left them to it. She had felt Derek's eyes on her as she grabbed her leather jacket and her keys and walked out the door, but he hadn't said anything. And John hadn't even noticed, he was so intent on putting the pieces back together.

She doesn't know why she left. The terminator proved itself a valuable weapon many times over the past few months; John is right to try to rebuild it. But it's still a machine, still just metal. And Sarah doesn't entirely trust it.

"Penny for your thoughts…?"

Sarah doesn't look at the man beside her. Maybe it's the whiskey, or maybe it's a sense of her own mortality. She turns her back on him, says over her shoulder as she walks back out the door, "Judgment day is coming. You'd best prepare for it."


	6. Chapter 6

**Written for the prompt - Derek and Sarah, the day after the world ends (125 words)**

Sarah stood amidst the rubble of all they had worked toward, tall and proud. Fires still smoldered in the distance and choking, acrid smoke clung to the landscape like a thick blanket. As Derek watched, she drew in on herself just a bit, stood a little less straight. He left John with his pet metal, picked his way carefully through the wreckage that had been the closest thing he'd had to a home until he reached her side.

Just as carefully as he'd crossed that distance, he put an arm around her shoulders, pulled her in against his side. She fit. She didn't put her arm around him, but still, she fit. He was wrong; _this_ was the closest thing he'd had to a home.


	7. Chapter 7

**Prompt: Derek Reese, beer**

If he let himself forget their purpose (break into a high-security government building and destroy a high-profile traffic control computer program destined to one day destroy the human race), Derek could almost believe that everything was okay, normal, safe. He sat at the table, cold beer in hand (even if the waitress _had_ looked at him a little funny for ordering one so early in the day) and a beautiful woman beside him, and he could almost pretend that their only reason for being was to enjoy the sunshine and the breeze and each other's company.

He'd only been 15 at Judgment Day; his parents had considered him too young, but he could imagine that this is what a date might have felt like. He glanced over at Sarah, sipping her iced tea and watching the heavily armed guards across the street. Not that he could really see being on a date with the woman who was, in fact if not in name, his brother's widow.

Derek lifted the glass to his lips and downed a third of the beer in one swallow. He could see the wheels turning as she watched, trying to figure out a way to get into that building. "Don't worry," he told her and leaned a little closer, "we're not going in through the front door."


	8. Chapter 8

**Prompt: Derek and Cameron, sleep**

She watches him as he sleeps. He is restless, shifting frequently on the couch that is his bed. Occasionally, he says things, even though he doesn't wake, "no" or "Kyle," and just once, "Sarah." Sometimes the sounds he makes form no words, but the agitation remains the same.

She watches him when is awake as well, and compares him to the man she knew in the future, the man who hated all things "metal" and who trained himself to always aim for the spot just above the right eye because it would kill or incapacitate either man or machine. He is the same, but he is different and she watches him to try to understand how this can be.

She doesn't ask John to explain, although she is certain that he would try. It is something that she wishes to discover for herself, and so each night she watches Derek Reese sleep, for it is easier to try to understand the man when the wakeful masks he wears are pushed aside by his dreams.


	9. Chapter 9

The first touch of the needle stung (it always did) but Derek ignored it (he always did). The words he'd read in a confiscated magazine while pretending to be some kind of war hero… Well, they'd struck a chord. Shit. They'd struck a fucking symphony. Whatever. They were words to live by. He didn't know who this Mother Jones was or why the Presidio Alto had felt the need to keep it away from the cadets, but he had a feeling that Sarah would like her.

The first word finished, he dipped the needle again into the thimble of blue ink. His newest tat wouldn't be pretty, but then it wasn't supposed to be. It didn't need to be.

By the time he was finished, Derek'd tuned out the discomfort so completely that it surprised him to look down at his forearm and see the redness of the skin around blue letters. But the red only emphasized what he supposed you could call his new motto.

_Pray for the dead and fight like hell for the living._


End file.
